github.com/Xueyang-Song/paper-pilot @1.0

Navigate the sea of academic papers — with AI as your co-pilot.

Features • Quick Start • Sources • Architecture • Contributing

What is Paper Pilot?

Paper Pilot is a local-first desktop research assistant built for scientists who are tired of switching between 10 browser tabs to find, read, and synthesize academic papers.

Everything runs on your machine — your papers, your notes, your AI conversations. No cloud lock-in, no subscription fees, no data leaving your computer.

You ──▶  Ask a research question
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     Paper Pilot crawls 8+ academic sources simultaneously
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     Papers downloaded → converted → indexed (FTS5 + vector search)
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     AI synthesizes insights from your local corpus
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You ──▶  Get answers grounded in real papers, not hallucinations

✨ Features

🚀 Quick Start

Requirements: - Node.js >= 22.18.0 - Python 3.11+ - (Optional) Ollama for local AI

# Clone and install
git clone https://github.com/Xueyang-Song/paper-pilot.git
cd paper-pilot
npm install

# Run in development
npm run dev

# Build for production
npm run build

# Package as desktop app
npm run package

Note: Dev server must use http://127.0.0.1:5173. If that port is busy, free it before running.

📚 Paper Sources

🏗 Architecture

paper-pilot/
├── src/
│   ├── electron/          # Main process (Node.js)
│   │   ├── crawlers/      # Academic source adapters
│   │   ├── db/            # SQLite + FTS5 + sqlite-vec
│   │   ├── agent/         # AI tool-calling agent
│   │   └── python/        # MarkItDown + Playwright bridge
│   └── renderer/          # React 19 + Vite UI
│       ├── workspace/     # ChatGPT-style chat interface
│       ├── projects/      # Project management rail
│       ├── artifacts/     # Paper & artifact panel
│       └── settings/      # API keys, policies
├── tests/                 # Vitest test suite
└── package.json

Tech Stack:

⚠️ Current Status

This is an early v1 — buildable, test-covered, but still hardening for production-level reliability.

🤝 Contributing

Contributions welcome. Please open an issue before large PRs to discuss approach.

npm run verify                 # Typecheck, tests, and production build
npm run test                   # Run test suite (Vitest)
npm run typecheck              # TypeScript strict checks
npm run test:crawlers:api      # Live no-key HTTP source smoke
npm run test:crawlers:browser  # Playwright browser crawler smoke

Built by a researcher, for researchers.